I am ashamed that I hadn’t reasoned this through given all the rubbish digital services have pulled with “purchases” being lies.
Nowadays you can almost reach every creator out there, and we use thousands of content and tools.
How would a financially average person can afford to pay these creators in such a scale?
A dollar at a time … I’m willing to give or donate a dollar, two dollars or even five at a time … if we all did that with a popular creator, they’d easily be able to reach a lot of money in a short time.
I donate to wikipedia, Open Source Software projects I use, firefox, thunderbird, ubuntu (although I am getting skeptical about this one) and other linux projects … on top of that I send funds to creators, app developers and lemmy instances and other fediverse projects and those people who maintain the software, servers and communities in the fediverse
In all, I probably spend about three or four hundred dollars a year or more to these projects … but I know that for the majority of them, the money is going to people that need it … not to people who just want to add to their wealth after never contributing anything of value other than their ownership of someone else’s work.
And if we all did this as users across the board … these small content creators would have more than enough to sustain themselves and continue creating and maintaining these projects
